Cadence Encounter

To use the Cadence tools, you must change this environment variable:

export OSUcells=/mada/software/techfiles/osu_soc_v2.7/cadence 

The OSU scripts for Cadence can be copied from here:

cp -rf /mada/software/techfiles/osu_soc_v2.7/cadence/flow/tsmc018

You will need to specify the correct top-level name and gate-level netlist name in encounter.conf. To place and route the design, type:

encounter -init encounter.tcl

with X11 exported to your local machine. If this completes successfully, you can hit "f" to center the layout. If you use the -cmd argument, it will save all your GUI commands into a file for replay later.

Bugs due to new version

reportTA is no longer a valid command. Instead, you should substitute this in the files with timeDesign. This is available under the Timing menu.

Notes on 45nm

If you want to synthesize a design using the Nangate FreePDK45 cell library, you need to make a few changes:

1) You need to compile the Nangate .lib into a .db and use that. To do this, run:

dc_shell-t

Then execute these commands:

read_lib /mada/software/techfiles/NangateOpenCellLibrary_PDKv1_3_v2009_07/liberty/NangateOpenCellLibrary_typical_conditional_ccs.lib  
write_lib NangateOpenCellLibrary

which will create a file NangateOpenCellLibrary.db. Move that to your project directory.

2) Then, these lines change to the compile_dc.tcl:

set search_path [concat  $search_path . ]
set link_library [set target_library [concat  [list NangateOpenCellLibrary.db ] [list dw_foundation.sldb]]]

3) In the encounter.conf, you need to reference the .lib file instead of the .tlf file. You also need to point to the .lef file. Specifically, these lines change:

set OSUcells /mada/software/techfiles/NangateOpenCellLibrary_PDKv1_3_v2009_07
set rda_Input(ui_timelib) "$OSUcells/liberty/NangateOpenCellLibrary_typical_conditional_ccs.lib"
set rda_Input(ui_leffile) "$OSUcells/lef/NangateOpenCellLibrary.lef"